Comment Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway? (Score 1) 161
No, that's not the way it works. I've actually voted on one of these paper-trail voting machines, and really, it's quite elegant; and voting on it gave me warm fuzzies that my vote would actually be counted.
The machine lets you pick your candidate via touchscreen, and performs basic sanity checking on your vote (it doesn't let you vote for two candidates, etc). When you reach the last page and touch "I'm ready to record my vote", it prints a paper receipt which it displays under glass, for you to verify. Then it rolls the receipt up for storage.
The voter doesn't take a copy of the receipt home. But the key is that the paper has been printed, and now there is a paper ballot that exists somewhere. This makes the system exactly as secure as our current paper-ballot system: in order for someone to defeat this, he'd have to physically gain access to the precinct office and destroy printed ballots. Certainly it is possible to do so, but the point is that it's very hard to do this on a large scale.
If I, as a voter, notice that the machine didn't print what I voted, I'll make a fuss. If multiple people make a fuss in one precinct, that will raise alarms. It doesn't even matter if most people don't bother to double-check the printed ballot, since all that's necessary is that a sufficient random sample *does* double-check.
See? It's no more corruptible than a box full of traditional paper ballots. On the other hand, a box that simply records my vote electronically is potentially *much* more corruptible than a paper-trail machine. If a hacker somehow gains access to the box and compromises the program inside, he can make it record whatever votes he likes, and there is absolutely no way to recover the original votes.
That's the key difference. As long as all e-voting machines print a ballot like that, I'm all for the technology. But not having a paper backup is just asking for trouble.
The machine lets you pick your candidate via touchscreen, and performs basic sanity checking on your vote (it doesn't let you vote for two candidates, etc). When you reach the last page and touch "I'm ready to record my vote", it prints a paper receipt which it displays under glass, for you to verify. Then it rolls the receipt up for storage.
The voter doesn't take a copy of the receipt home. But the key is that the paper has been printed, and now there is a paper ballot that exists somewhere. This makes the system exactly as secure as our current paper-ballot system: in order for someone to defeat this, he'd have to physically gain access to the precinct office and destroy printed ballots. Certainly it is possible to do so, but the point is that it's very hard to do this on a large scale.
If I, as a voter, notice that the machine didn't print what I voted, I'll make a fuss. If multiple people make a fuss in one precinct, that will raise alarms. It doesn't even matter if most people don't bother to double-check the printed ballot, since all that's necessary is that a sufficient random sample *does* double-check.
See? It's no more corruptible than a box full of traditional paper ballots. On the other hand, a box that simply records my vote electronically is potentially *much* more corruptible than a paper-trail machine. If a hacker somehow gains access to the box and compromises the program inside, he can make it record whatever votes he likes, and there is absolutely no way to recover the original votes.
That's the key difference. As long as all e-voting machines print a ballot like that, I'm all for the technology. But not having a paper backup is just asking for trouble.
